They are referred to as The Arabian Nights' Entertainments or often as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

ABC is simply calling it Arabian Nights when it premieres tomorrow night and Monday night.

By any name, it is still the collection of Persian, Arabian, Asian and Indian legends noted for the exploits of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin.

"Everybody knows the stories," producer Robert Halmi Sr. says, "but nobody ever read the book."

Of course not. That's why we have Robert Halmi.

Forgot what Animal Farm was about? Try Pete Postlethwaite with the voices of Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammer.

Halmi has overseen the adaptation of acclaimed books and legendary tales, including Lonesome Dove and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

And now, Arabian Nights. (Probably because it's one of three or four printed stories yet to turned into an American mini-series.)

"The book, if ever anybody wants to read it, is 14 volumes," warns the veteran producer.

Providing the narrative is Scheherazade, a young woman who distracts a bloodthirsty ruler and postpones her own execution by spinning tall tales and then withholding the conclusion until the next evening.

Sinbad does not appear in this staging, although Aladdin and Ali Baba do.

"The point was to tell the stories that relate to the relationship of the sultan and Scheherazade. The stories are just an example of how this relationship was carrying on," Halmi says.

Other chapters presented in the mini-series are The Sultan and the Beggar, The Three Brothers and the story of a hunchback named BacBac.

"I loved the BacBac story because it was funny. I know all of that by heart, " says Mili Avital, one of Arabian Nights' stars.

Nights also features Dougray Scott, Rufus Sewell, Jason Scott Lee, John Leguizamo and Alan Bates.

"Eventually, of course, the story I liked the most was our story. It was such a rich relationship," Avital says.

Avital (Kissing a Fool) is Scheherazade, the newlywed sultana. Scott was Ever After's charming prince but had to completely switch gears to play the sultan of Baghdad.

"I just had to smile and kiss Drew Barrymore in Ever After, which is very nice. In this, Schariar goes through a lot of madness. He is very emotional and paranoid," Scott says. "I looked in the mirror every day and told myself, 'I'm bad . . . ' I'm more like the character in Arabian Nights than I am in Ever After. I'm not very charming at all, really."

Arabian Nights has the usual tidal wave of special effects (magic carpets and dragons are a must) and the giddy humour of a ribald pantomime play.

Sewell -- Arabian Nights' Ali Baba -- says shooting on location in Turkey gives the film a very unique flavour.

"There's a lot more camel wrangling than you're used to," says the British star of A Man of No Importance and Dark City.

"It wasn't a particularly gruelling shoot. The only problem was getting used to some of the strange dishes they had," he says.

"Somebody at the hotel very proudly gave me a mousse that had chicken in it. I found this lump of chicken in my mouth halfway through eating this pudding."

There are worse things than eating chicken mousse. Like, say, Robert Halmi's mini-series The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns last season.

Halmi productions can range from the good (Gulliver's Travels, In Cold Blood) to the fair (Cleopatra, Merlin) to the awful (Noah's Ark, The Odyssey).

"With all my modesty -- as I'm famous for -- I must say that this is probably this best thing I've ever done," Halmi says.

That's something Halmi hasn't dared to claim since The 10th Kingdom aired on NBC earlier this year and probably will never say again.

At least until Jason and the Argonauts or Don Quixote hit screens later this spring, anyway.

Or maybe not even until you ask him what he's working on next.

"I started pre-production on probably the biggest and most adventurous mini-series ever to be done on television," Halmi says.

Mercifully, he isn't talking about a sequel to Leprechauns. He estimates it will take more than two years to complete work on ABC's Dinotopia.

"The story is the discovery of a new continent where dinosaurs and humans live happily together. And the dinosaurs are the smart ones."

Thanks to Rai for sharing this!